Our agency has just “given birth” to an official Facebook brand presence for lia sophia. Their business is largely driven by referrals and relationships, and social media tools align perfectly with how their Advisors work. We’ve also created a photo sharing app that brings the lia sophia brand to life – by literally allowing fans to share jewelry on photos of their friends. The photo sharing app was designed to tap into the sharing functionality Facebook provides. With a simple call to action of “add lia sophia jewelry to your friends’ photos”, a user can select a photo from their own albums or their friends’ available albums they want to decorate with lia sophia jewelry. Complete with cropping and rotation features, users can get their touches of jewelry just right before sharing. Users can save the photos and post their friends’ walls which generate powerful news feeds for awareness. The app also allows a user save an unlimited amount of images that they have created and sent to friends and any that they have received from friends.

Thoughtful post via Mashable. Not sure I agree with the idea of banning brands – think it’s probably a case by case thing. But…do agree that forcing brands to put a human face on their Twitter interaction would better serve them in the long run.

Are we being “Facebooked” to death? How much friend connectivity are we supposed to take? Apparently a lot more. Facebook has launched yet another (dare I say) instrusive feature called Facebook Connect, that allows members to log onto other webistes using their Facebook ID and track their friend’s activities on those sites. Connect also lets you broadcast your activity to your friends. So basically if you’ve discovered a great new Skateboarding

Cat video on “Funny or Die” you can invite your other half-wit buddies over in real time to check it out. All the other big names are getting in on this act as well. Fine, I suppose. I still wonder if there’s real utility to this kind of functionality. Do you really want your friends tracking your online movements? I don’t want my spouse tracking me online much less a bunch of people I barely remember from elementary school.

With literally thousands of social net like objects proliferating who has the bandwidth to dip into a single one for more than a few minutes a day. Better yet, why should I spend my time sharing photos of my vacation in Puerto Rico when I could be sharing pet tips over at Fuzzster? The big hands are betting heavily right now on widget power as the real driver of attention and engagement. Two of the biggies, investment firms, Fidelity and T. Rowe Price, paid $50 million for a 9.1% stake in Slide, a San Francisco- based company best known as the purveyor of entertainments like SuperPoke, which lets Facebook users “ninja kick” or “bodyslam” or “throw a pillow at” their friend Got that? The community is not about sharing fond memories with college buddies…it’s where’s that thingy that lets me throw virtual dog poop at them. Slide CEO Max Levchin dishes in a recent Fortune article about the power of widgets (that $50million stake implies a valuation of half a billion btw). “The metrics for success,” says Levchin, “are going to shift away from who can provide the most reach toward who is paid the most attention.”

We here at Black Match have long been citizens of the virtual universe, now it seems the rest of the marketing world is catching on. Whether it’s working within a pre-existing universe like Second Life or creating a custom universe like MTV’s Laguna Beach, what’s hot at the moment is virtuality. Second Life is up to 400,000 users and counting – exchanging real money – and savvy media properties are angling for awareness among this concentrated but highly influential population. Look no further than this New York Times article for a quick bit of insight on how some very youth oriented properties like MTV are pushing the envelope.

“At MTV, reality has always been a moving target. Sixteen years ago, the network heralded the era of reality television with “The Real World.” Three years ago, it pushed the genre further with “Laguna Beach: The Real OC,” in which the mundane lives of a clique of pretty teenagers were presented in a way that appeared scripted and dramatic.

Now the cable channel aims to push the boundaries of false reality one step further. This week, MTV will introduce Virtual Laguna Beach, an online service in which fans of the program can immerse themselves — or at least can immerse digitized, three-dimensional characters, called avatars, that they control — in virtual versions of the show’s familiar seaside hangouts(see article).”

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Super Genius LLC is a digital media and creative incubator that excels at bringing fresh, new thinking to existing strategy as well as blank-page strategic development. Our mission is to open up unique and exciting ways of connecting brands and consumers.

"The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet." William Gibson